Textual Confessions: Narcissism in Anne Sexton's Early Poetry

Author(s): Jo Gill
Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 59-87
Published by: Hofstra University
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Textual Confessions:
Narcissism in Anne Sexton's
Early Poetry

JoGill

Confessional poetry, a mode that was prominent in the United States in

the 1960s and early 70s, has, over time, come to be regarded as a regret-
table, aberrant,and momentary spasm in the development of that nation's
literature. It is habitually, if a little inaccurately, consigned to a specific
and distant time and place: Robert Phillips, the author of the first and
indeed only full-length account of the mode, situates it in "Post-Christian,
post-Kennedy, post-Pill America" (xiii). Its chief impact is now under-
stood as providing a foil against which to measure the sophistication and
achievements of postconfessional writing-Language poetry, the New
York school, and various other avant-garde and postmodern forms. As
Alan Williamson suggests, "confessional poetry-almost from the mo-
ment that unfortunate term was coined-has been the whipping boy of
half a dozen newer schools, New Surrealism, New Formalism, Language
poetry" ("Stories" 51).
Marjorie Perloff defines the exciting "radicalpoetries" that dominate
contemporary American poetry by distinguishing them from an earlier
tradition of personal lyricism:
The more radical poetries of the past few decades, whatever
their particular differences, have come to reconceive the "open-
ing of the field," not as an entrance into authenticitybut, on the
contrary, as a turn toward artifice,toward poetry as making or
praxis rather than poetry as impassioned speech, as self-expres-
sion. ("Changing Face" 93)

Literature
Twentieth-Century 50.1 Spring 2004 59

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Jo Gill

Similarly, Michael Davidson characterizes the interests of current Lan-

guage poetry by reference to its difference from the "expressive" poetry
that preceded it:

Language writing bases its analysis of authority not on the

author's particular politics but in the verbal means by which any
statement claims its status as truth. Moreover, by foregrounding
the abstract features of the speech act rather than the authentic-
ity of the expressive moment, the poet acknowledges the contin-
gency of utterances in social interchange. (74)
Both Perloff and Davidson define postmodern poetry by reference to
its other-confessional or self-expressive poetry.Yet paradoxically,as the
argument below demonstrates, what fundamentally characterizes this
other and thus gives definition to "radical poetries" is the same deeply
embedded interest in "artifice,"in "poetry as making or praxis,"and in
the "verbal means by which any statement claims its status as truth" as is
thought to characterize postconfessional writing alone. "Authenticity,"
"artifice,""praxis,"and "truth" are the crucial and contested terms here.
The implication that contemporary avant-garde poetry is "radical"
while the confessional poetry that preceded it is reactionary and con-
servative itself merits scrutiny. In its own time confessional poetry was
perceived to be a profoundly radical movement. It represented a startling
departure fron--and offered powerful and potentially fatal resistance
to-the conventions of the high academic poetry that it succeeded, a
literature that Irving Howe describes as "responsible and moderate. And
tame" (qtd. in Gray 216). For A. Alvarez, one of the form's earliest cham-
pions and commentators, confessional or "extremist" (229) poetry had
apocalyptic potential. Its function--indeed its responsibility-was to break
the mould of what he termed "the accepted Academic-Modern style."
It is apparent from any survey of the criticism of confessional poetry
that the mode is habitually and negatively associated with an authorial
self-absorption verging on narcissism.Elizabeth Bruss, for example, refers
to the "narcissisticindulgence of the confessional tradition" (18). Edward
Lucie-Smith, writing in 1964 in CriticalQuarterly,argues that in contem-
porary "personal" poetry "introversion seems to have triumphed over
experiment.The poet gazes with obsessive narcissismat his own reflection
in the mirror of art" (357). Alvarez, in his highly influential TimesLiterary
Supplementessay "Beyond All This Fiddle," distinguishes Robert Lowell's

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Narcissismin Anne Sexton'sEarlyPoetry

Life Studies from the work of "vulgar" confessional poets, concluding in

Lowell's defense that Life Studies"is left with something more sustaining
than mere narcissism" (230). He also quotes, approvingly, Sylvia Plath's
comment: "I think that personal experience shouldn't be a kind of shut
box and a mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be
generally relevant to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on"
(231).
Of the confessional poets of post-Second World War America, it has
been said that none was "more consistently and uniformly confessional
than Anne Sexton [...] her name has almost become identified with the
genre" (Lerner 52). And it is Sexton, more than any of her peers, who
has been pronounced guilty of narcissism.As Joyce Carol Oates explains:
"Sexton has been criticized for the intensity of her preoccupations: al-
ways the self, the victimized, bullying, narcissistic self." Patricia Meyer
Spacks condemns her "shrill narcissism" and "insistent mirroring" (188).
Alan Williamson complains of the "later Sexton" that she has become
"the uneasy narcissist,self-indulgent and sarcastic at once" ("Confession
and Tragedy" 178), and Helen Vendler pointedly gives thanks for a rare
volume in which the poet "turn[s] away from the morass of narcissism"
(441). As Alicia Ostriker concludes, "Anne Sexton is the easiest poet in
the world to condescend to. Critics get in line for the pleasure of filing
her under N for Narcissist" ("That Story" 263).
It is the contention of this essay that narcissism,rather than exempli-
fying the difference between confessional and postconfessional forms of
poetry, represents its potential convergence. By exploring the mythical
and psychoanalytic roots of narcissism and examining recent readings of
the term's place in contemporary literature and culture, it is possible to
recuperate the adjective narcissisticand demonstrate its importance in ap-
parently divergent poetic traditions. Narcissism is to be understood not
as a limiting and inadvertent error peculiar to confessional poetry (and
acute in the work of Anne Sexton) but as a sophisticated and produc-
tive strategy employed by confessional and avant-garde poetries alike in
their negotiation of such shared preoccupations as language, subjectivity,
representation, and referentiality.
What appears to be authorial self-absorption in Sexton's work may,
then, be read and defended as a sophisticated textualnarcissismof the kind
delineated by Linda Hutcheon in NarcissisticNarrative and more typically
identified with the "radical poetries" mentioned above. In Hutcheon's

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Jo Gill

analysis,it is "the narrativetext, and not the author, that is being described
as narcissistic" (1). She concentrates on a writing that is textually rather
than biographically "self-reflective, self-informing, self-reflexive, auto-
referential, auto-representational" and that, above all, contemplates and
interrogates its own "narrativeand/or linguistic identity."Sexton's confes-
sional poetry demands to be read in these terms. It foreshadows, in more
fundamental ways than has been recognized, the markedly self-reflexive
tendencies of more recent American poetry. This is not to assert that it
represents a proto-postmodern rejection of authenticity, referentiality,or
expression but rather to suggest that it is skeptical, knowing, and inquisi-
tive about the status of these and about the processes by which they are
established and understood.
Since Hutcheon's NarcissisticNarrativemainly concerns fiction, many
of her examples and conclusions derive from a comparison of contempo-
rary or postmodern novels with those of the dominant (that is, realist)tra-
dition. Indeed, Hutcheon makes a point of distinguishing between poetry
and fiction, arguing that, in this context, poetry is in advance of the novel:
"Of all the literary genres, the novel is the one which has perhaps most
resisted being 'rescued' from the myth of the instrumentality of language.
Poetry escaped with the aid of the Symbolists, the New Critics, and oth-
ers" (87). Further,she suggests that "whereas poetic language is now more
or less accepted as autonomous and intransitive, fiction and narrativestill
suggest a transitive and referential use of words" (88). In both respects I
would disagree with Hutcheon. Confession, unlike much other modern
poetry, has not been entirely liberated from this "myth of the instru-
mentality of language."The language of the confessional text continues
often to be read as "transitive and referential,"as a truthful representation
of the lived experience of the author. Confessional poetry, unlike other
postmodern poetry, persists in being read as an expressive/realist mode,
offering privileged and reliable insight into personal experience.
Yet Sexton's form of confession, like "narcissisticnarrative,"resistssuch
readings. Her apparent self-absorption masks a knowing and theoretically
astute textual engagement with the problematic processes of writing and
representation. Her poetry is keenly aware-and indeed flaunts its aware-
ness-that its truths are arbitrary and its authority disputable. Crucially,
it is aware that its putative originality is displaced by a discursive and
productive relationship between text and reader.Just as narcissistic nar-
rative thematizes or mirrors its own processes of reception (Hutcheon,

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Narcissismin Anne Sexton'sEarlyPoetry

Narcissisticxvi), so too the confessional text takes as one of its subjects the
complicity of its own audience in the generation of its meaning-in the
"completion" of its truth (Foucault 66).
In The Mirrorand the Lamp,M. H.Abrams distinguishes between ex-
pressive and mimetic theories of art. While conventionally, confessional
poetry belongs to the expressive realm (it is the "internal made external"
[22]), it is also, as I have suggested, possible and persuasive to read it as
mimetic, as textually narcissistic,as mirroring its own aesthetic processes.
Indeed, the image of the simultaneously luminous and reflective glass
bowl that dominates Sexton's poem "For John Who Begs Me Not to
Enquire Further" (hereafter "For John") is important in encapsulating
both of these possibilities-a point to which I will return. With this in
mind, one might argue that Sexton's writing looks both inside and outside
simultaneously and to that extent is always doubled, split, or fragmented
in its perspective.
The early poems discussed here-"An Obsessive Combination of
Ontological Inscape,Trickery and Love" (hereafter"An Obsessive Combi-
nation") and "The Double Image,"both written in 1958, and "For John,"
written in 1959, are narcissistic in the sense that they are intrigued by
and reflect on how, exactly, their meanings are realized and shared.' They
seek to reach and convey a better understanding not of the experience
ostensibly at the source of each but of the way in which they themselves
work as confession. Mirrors and other reflective surfaces (windows, glass
bowls, portraits) are fundamental to this enquiry, either covertly-as in
the case of "An Obsessive Combination," where mirroring processes are
"structuralized, internalized" (Hutcheon, Narcissistic7)-or overtly-as
in "ForJohn," where they are "explicitly thematized."The textual narcis-
sism that we see here forms the foundation of Sexton's exploration of
the dynamics of confession in later poems such as those in the "Letters to
Dr.Y" sequence (1960-70), with their sophisticated analyses of their own
linguistic processes, and in "Talking to Sheep" (1974), which displays an
acute consciousness and condemnation of its own audience. Throughout,
narcissism is presented as both strategy (reflection as process) and object
(the reflection as material subject of enquiry) and, while generous in
proliferating meanings, is also always shown to be susceptible to error, to
be potentially distorting and distorted.
The cultural origins of the concept of narcissism are to be found in
the story of Echo and Narcissus from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Narcissus is a

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Jo Gill

beautiful and proud youth, the object of many observers' unrequited de-
sires-including those of the nymph Echo, who "cannot stay silent when
another person speaks, but yet has not learned to speak first herself" (83).
Narcissus spurns Echo's advances and in despair she retreatsto the woods
and caves, wasting away until only her voice remains. As punishment for
his pride Narcissus is condemned to experience the same frustrateddesire,
and falls in love with his own reflected image in a pool. He is admonished:
"the thing you are seeing does not exist: only turn aside and you will
lose what you love" (85). Realizing that, like Echo, he will never possess
the object of his love, he too wastes away and dies, leaving in place of his
body a circle of flowers.
The myth of Narcissus is important to Sexton's poetics in several re-
spects. It offers a framework within which to develop themes of self-love
and desire, it offers fruitful metaphors such as those of the mirror and the
cave, and it lends the structural and linguistic potential of the echo. As
James Goodwin has argued, in the context of the origins of autobiogra-
phy,
the figure of Narcissus represents complexes-or, in other words,
structures of great intellectual and affective force-that are in-
dicative of the functions and consequences of self-knowledge at
different stages in our cultural history. (69)
The story of Narcissus is also of profound significance in Sigmund
Freud'saccount of human psychology and is instrumental to his recogni-
tion and definition of the superego. In "On Narcissism" Freud identifies
a universal"primary and normal narcissism"(66)-an early and necessary
stage of self-love that must be transcended, the other replacing the ego as
love object, if the subject is to assume his or her proper place in relation
to parents, to subsequent sex objects, and to the wider world.
In the context of Sexton's exploration and defense of narcissism,
Freud'sargument is influential because he asserts-in contradiction to the
opinions of his predecessors and peers-that narcissism is common and
"normal,"that there is contiguity between "healthy and neurotic subjects"
(73).The belief that narcissism is a universal and shared condition domi-
nates Sexton's poem "ForJohn." It specifically informs the I/you dialogue
that is sustained throughout and insists on the reciprocity of the subject's
and implied reader's experience. Freud's analysis is valuable too because
it describes in psychoanalytic terms the tendency to turn inward, "away

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Narcissismin Anne Sexton'sEarlyPoetry

from the external world" (66) that, although apparently characteristic of

confessionalism, is at issue in Sexton's poetry. It also traces the necessary
route outward by which "our mental life [...] pass[es] beyond the limits
of narcissism"and forms an attachment to objects (78). In addition, "On
Narcissism" foregrounds the importance in psychological terms of ob-
serving and "being observed" (91). It recognizes-and this is crucial to an
understanding of confessional writing and its reception-the compelling
attraction of someone else's narcissism:"it seems very evident that another
person's narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced
part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love" (82-83).
In Freud, then, we find what might be described as the first of several
psychoanalytic defenses of narcissism-a defense that Jacques Lacan was
later to take up.2 For Lacan, narcissism-the gaze in the mirror-initi-
ates the infant child's realization and confirmation of his or her identity.
The mirror is vital to the two finally inextricable processes of finding
and naming (or textualizing) the self. In Lacanian terms, it is by means
of the mirror stage ("le stade du miroir" [2]) that the aspiring subject
leaves the realm of the imaginary and gains access to the symbolic order
of language-a journey that is invoked in Sexton's poem "The Double
Image," discussed later.
Richard Sennett and Christopher Lasch, writing about contemporary
American culture in the 1970s-the period that had, contentiously, been
labeled the "me decade" (Lasch 238)-study the growth and dominance
of narcissistic "personality traits" in the "prevailing social conditions"
(239). Sennett identifies a problem with the erosion of boundaries be-
tween public and private life, between external and internal worlds-a
concern that is also voiced in Sexton's writing. He argues that "cultural
forces [. . .] have produced this narcissistic self-absorption" (333) and
insists that it is the "social environment" (12) that is at fault and must
be changed. Lasch discusses narcissism-the extreme consequence and
end of modern society's "logic of individualism" (xv)-in the context of
changes in American domestic, cultural, and political life. Narcissism, he
suggests, represents a reaction to and retreat from a general loss of faith in
contemporary society, in the lessons of the past, and in the promise of the
future (xvi-xvii). For Lasch, it is a limiting, impoverished (xviii) stance,
one that exemplifies the individual's inability to "make connection with
the world" (240).
For Sexton, however, as in Freud and Lacan, narcissism is broader,

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more complex, and finally more productive. Paradoxically, the self-dis-

closure in her work is made always with a view to its reader; while os-
tensibly focusing inward, it also looks outward and turns away from the
self. Crucially, Sexton's poetry is predicated on restoring the "connection
with the world" that Lasch sees as absent in narcissism (whereas Freud, as
Jeffrey Berman explains, sees narcissism as precisely engendering a "rela-
tionship between the self and the object world" [10]) and on flamboyantly
laying bare the processes by which this connection is established. This
communicative impulse has tended to be lost in many readings of what
narcissism signifies.
In Sexton's "An Obsessive Combination,""The Double Image,"and
"For John," the I can only be comprehended, the self only known, by
placing itself in conjunction with an other. The I alone is not self-suf-
ficient and cannot be expressed without a you. Thus all three poems
are predicated on a persistent and sustaining dialogue. In this context, a
narcissistic perspective denotes not a solipsistic devotion to the self but
recognition that the self can only be perceived as part of a larger social
context, as one among many. Narcissism here is an outward-looking
gesture or process representing not stasis (Lasch's"diminishing expecta-
tions" [8]) but change, not silence (Plath's"shut box") but dialogue and
communication-it engages the Echo at the heart of Ovid's tale.3
The seeds of this interest in the fertile and discursive possibilities of
narcissism-undcerstood as a purposive textual strategy rather than as a
symptom of debilitating self-absorption-are apparent in one of Sexton's
earliest and uncollected poems. "An Obsessive Combination of Ontologi-
cal Inscape, Trickery and Love" was drafted in 1958 and first published
in Voices:A Jourlnalof Poetryin 1959. The poeml is striking for the way
in which it anticipates, and makes explicit, concerns that are developed
subsequently in her writing. For example, we see here the roots of a sus-
tained interest in the function and fallibility of language, expressed later
in poems such as "Is It True?" and "Hurry Up Please It'sTime" (1972?)
and throughout the posthumous volume The Auful Rowing TowardGod
(1975). "An Obsessive Combination," although described by D)ianeWood
Middlebrook as "an awkward little exercise" (124), is paradigmatic of
Sexton's poetics in its determined and self-conscious exploration of its
own linguistic and representational status.
"An Obsessive Combination" is narcissistic in the sense that in it
"process [is] made visible" (Hutcheon, Narcissistic6). It exemplifies what

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Narcissismin Anne Sexton'sEarlyPoetry

Hutcheon defines as a characteristically postmodern interest in "how

art is created, not just in what is created" (8). Arguably, of course, such
self-consciousness has a long literary history. For Hutcheon, however
(and Sexton's writing, I would contend, sustains this reading), "the more
modern textual self-preoccupation differs mostly in its explicitness, its
intensity, and its own critical self-awareness,"and this is a consequence of
a post-Saussurian "change in the concept of language" (18).
To look first at the title of the poem, the adjective "obsessive" seems
to lay itself open to typical accusations of confessional compulsion and
self-absorption. However, it transpires that the obsession is not with the
self but with writing, with the linguistic strategies by which meaning is
generated and shared. "Ontological" shifts attention away from direct,
lived, "raw" (to use Robert Lowell's term [qtd. in Hamilton 277]) ex-
perience to a more abstract, impersonal consideration of the condition
of being. "Combination," too, has considerable resonance in the context
of Sexton's poetics, signifying the combination or meeting of minds, the
discursive relationship between speaker and reader required for the con-
fession successfully to be created and disseminated.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's notion of "inscape" is the lodestone of
the poem and plays a key role in disclosing Sexton's larger poetics. It is
explained by Webster's ThirdNew InternationalDictionaryas
Inward significant character or quality belonging uniquely to
objects or events in nature and human experience esp. as per-
ceived by the blended observation and introspection of the poet
and in turn embodied in patterns of such specific poetic ele-
ments as imagery, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, sound symbolism,
and allusion.

Clearly, "inscape" suggests the complex and seemingly contradictory

process, subsequently explored in "For John," by which looking out and
in ("blend[ing] observation and introspection") become synonymous. It
connotes the way in which meaning is realized-in the dual and seem-
ingly contradictory sense of being made apparent ("embodied in pat-
terns") and being received. Hopkins writes:

afteringof the inscape must take place in

oftening,over-and-overing,
order to detach it to the mind and in this light poetry is speech
which afters and oftens its inscape, speech couched in a repeat-
ing figure. (qtd. in Gardner xxiin2; Hopkins's emphasis)4

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The inner essence is projected outward by the same kinds of linguistic

and syntactical patterning, repetition, and palindromic construction as we
see in Sexton's poem.
In one of the Crawshaw Lectures that Sexton delivered at Colgate
University in 1972 she describes this projection: "one writes of oneself
[...] in order to invite in" and "to find the way, out through experience"
(Lecture 9, p. 1; my emphases). Thus "An Obsessive Combination," like
many later poems, takes as its subject the liminal space between I and you,
speaker and reader, exposing and exploring the boundaries between self
and object world. It traces the process by which the self and its metonyms
(here iniagination and ideas) manifest themselves in and connect with the
exterior-and this is primarily, indeed unavoidably, through language.
"An Obsessive Combination" achieves its effects by the "generative
[word] play" and "linguistic self-consciousness" identified by Hutcheon
as characteristic of narcissistic narrative (Narcissistic120(),118). Moreover,
in its "performative" (Perloff, Dance 176) and "playful"(Hutcheon, Politics
34) aspects, the poem may be said to display some of the defining features
of postmodernist writing. Hutcheon sees as typical of such texts linguistic
features such as acrostics, anagrams, cryptograms, and puns (Narcissistic
119) that serve to "call the reader's attention to the fact that the text is
made up of words, words which are delightfully fertile in creative sug-
gestiveness" (101).The title of the poem is a near acrostic, containing the
word coital (perhaps suggestive of self and other joining together).s The
text itself features numerous puns, homonyms, and anagrams ("tiers,"
"tries,""rites,""right," "routes" [4]). It also incorporates the palindrome
"RATS / ... STAR," a supreme example of narcissisticwordplay,one that
appears repeatedly in later poems: "With Mercy for the Greedy" (1960)
concludes with a despairing and self-reflexive definition of poetry as "the
tongue's wrangle, / the world's pottage, the rat'sstar"(63), and "Hurry Up
Please It'sTime" features a sustained dialogue between the paired voices
of"God" and "Ms. D)og" (384-95).
The opening lines of"An Obsessive Combination"-- "Busy, with an
idea for a code, I write / signals hurrying from left to right" (4)-confirm
the self-reflexivity of the title. "Busy" suggests not only that the speaker is
preoccupied ("obsessive"?)but also that this is important work (business).
The fascination here is not with personal experience, but with thoughts,
ideas, semantic and epistemological sequences-with an "idea for a code"
in the first line and with "reasons"in line 4.

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Narcissism
in AnneSexton'sEarlyPoetry

That the poem is "a code" and that writing "signals"confirm its
interest in the hermeneutic process by which words emerge and are
deciphered.The metaphorof the "code"indicatesthat the confessional
text might obscure (aswe will see in a moment, I use the verb advisedly)
ratherthan, as is commonly thought, lay bare its secrets.The line break
after"write"suggests,and the restof the poem confirms,that the "signals"
are autonomous;the poet writes,yet in what seems to be a distinctmove-
ment, it is the "signals"thathurryacrossthe page.Languagein this poem,
as elsewherein Sexton, pre-existsand dominatesthe subject,constructs
ratherthan reflectsexperience.AsHutcheon argues:"inliterature,words
createworlds;they arenot necessarilycounters,howeveradequate,to any
extraliteraryreality.In that very fact lies their aestheticvalidityand their
ontological status"(Narcissistic102-03).
"An Obsessive Combination" examines this complex and-as it
transpires-amazingprocess:
[. . .] I write
signalshurryingfrom left to right,
or right to left, by obscureroutes,
for my own reasons;takinga word like "writes"
down tiers of tries until its secretrites
make sense.
The image of the physicaland orderlyprogressionof languageacrossthe
page ("leftto right")offersa metaphorfor the way the act of confession
is, typically,thought to put things"right"in the therapeuticsense.How-
ever,as this poem demonstrates,it is not the simple act of releaseor the
tappingof the wellspringof inner compulsionthatmakesthingsrightbut
ratherthe textualization,the act of writing. Moreover,as the addendum
in the next line ("or right to left") indicates,the act of confession may
compound ratherthan resolve problems.It may not offer the "expres-
sive-purgativerelease"that Alicia Ostriker (Stealing126), for example,
expects of the mode but may insteadcomplicate,confuse,and ultimately
make sinister.
The recourse to the "obscure routes"suggests that understanding
may emerge from the dark(from the private,the unseemly,the sinister),
which is therebyrecuperatedas a viable sourcefor poetry.In this respect,
the poem anticipates"ForJohn,"where the inauspicious"narrowdiary
of my mind"(34) producesand refractssomething of dazzlingand broad

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Jo Gill

significance ("something outside of myself"). It also paves the way for

a number of later poems, including "With Mercy for the Greedy" and
"Hurry Up Please It's Time," in which equally abject or occluded ex-
perience is "amazingly"-to speaker and reader alike-transformed into
radiant meaning.
In "An Obsessive Combination" language, perception, and meaning
are constantly in flux, multiplying ceaselessly:

[...] takinga wordlike"writes"

down tiers of tries until its secret rites
make sense; or until, suddenly, RATS
can amazingly and funnily become STAR
and right to left that small star
is mine, for my own liking, to stare
its five lucky pins inside out [...]
Authorial responsibility is denied, hence the passivity of voice and the
astonishment at these linguistic and ontological transformations.Certainly
Sexton does not go as far as later Language poets in rupturing the bond
between signifier and signified: "RATS" and "STAR," while locked in
a palindromic relationship, do also connote distinct and opposing refer-
ents that are metaphorically suggestive within the context of the poem.
However, she places this bond under critical scrutiny (the transposition
of a letter or phoneme can drastically alter the signification of a word).
Nothing, Sexton insists, can be made into something, and this by a seem-
ingly random succession of semantic shifts.
The enthusiastic explanatory rhetoric of the second half of the poem,
with its bright adverbs ("suddenly,""amazingly,"and "funnily") and its
gleeful aside ("for my own liking"), gives way, in the final clause, to a
more skeptical and resigned tone:
and right to left that small star
is mine, for my own liking, to stare
its five lucky pins inside out, to store
forever kindly, as if it were a star
I touched and a miracle I really wrote.
The tentative "as if" concedes that words-and the confessional text-
may not deliver what is expected of them, that language may fail. The
sudden shift at the end from the present tense to the conditional and

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qualified suggests that the epiphany that the poem seems to promise is
a transient thing. "An Obsessive Combination" warns that "RATS" may
become "STAR" not by a miracle but by semantic "trickery."Thus we
are returned to the textuality of the confessional poem, to its status as
"autonomous and intransitive object" (Hutcheon, Narcissistic88). "An
Obsessive Combination," one of Sexton's earliest poems, is paradigmatic
of much of her later writing in that it is unable or unwilling to proffer
closure. It refuses the temptations of an easy and satisfying conclusion,
finishing instead on an open-ended and conditional note ("as if it were").
In Hutcheon's terms-like many postmodern texts-it "admits its own
provisionality" (Poetics13).
Similar concerns inform "The Double Image," a complex and pro-
foundly artful poem that contemplates the relationships between three
generations of women: the speaker, her dying mother, and her infant
daughter.The defining motifs are the fluctuating mental and physical sick-
ness of the speaker and her mother, the patterns of absence and presence
that define the relationships, and the dual portraits (or double images)
that the mother commissions of herself and the speaker and hangs "on
opposite walls" (40)."The Double Image" may be read in terms of Lacan's
understanding of narcissism-as an examination of the way in which we
achieve subjectivity by perceiving and identifying ourselves in relation to
others. For Lacan, as we have seen, the mirror (or the "mirror stage" [2])
is fundamental to this process. What is interesting in "The Double Im-
age," though, is that beneath the "transitive and referential" (Hutcheon,
Narcissistic88) surface of the poem-the narrative of loss and recovery
that ostensibly inspires,shapes, and validates it-lies a compelling, effective
examination of its own processes of production and reception.
"The Double Image" is not, then, only or primarily about the rela-
tionships and experiences it describes. It is about its own status as confes-
sion. It is a metapoem that flaunts its own mirroring processes (Hutcheon,
Narcissistic20) in order to draw attention to its constructed, contingent,
and finally illusory nature. The poem's title gestures toward this double-
ness and signals its larger achievement: its self-reflexive-and arguably
postmodern-undermining of the mimetic strategies apparently at its
thematic and structural core. For what the poem describes and finally
exemplifies is a succession of doublings or reflections mimicking only
each other (the dual portraits of the speaker and mother, the image of the
speaker looking at her own painted image and drafting her own textual

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portrait). Speaker and reader alike are locked in the endless mise en abyme
characteristic of postmodernism and typical of narcissistic narrative, a
proliferation of images in infinite regress offering no necessary access to
extratextual reality.
"The Double Image" is intensely catoptric. The arrangement of the
poem's seven sections represents a near-perfect symmetry of action. In
the first three sections we see the daughter and then the speaker leaving
home, followed by the central (fourth) section, which denotes a liminal
moment of uncertainty.The closing three sections complete the symmetry,
first the speaker and then the daughter returning to the family home.
The multiple repetitions within the poem ("Too late, / too late" in
section 2 [36],"as if,""as if,""as if" in section 3 [38]) echo, mimicking the
proliferation of reflections that the poem describes. The emphatic if ir-
regular end rhymes work in a similar way and reflect the claustrophobiaof
the situation with all three participantsseemingly trapped in a hall of mir-
rors.There is a constant swaying, forward and backward movement within
the poemn-not only of action (the symmetrical pattern of departure and
return mentioned above) but of attention-such that the reader,like the
speaker, is forced to look from one mirrored image to another and then
back again. In this way the text brings "to readers'attention their central
and enabling role" in the production of meaning (Hutcheon, Narcissistic
xii).
The poe1in emphasizes the synmmetryof the double images and their
implicit polarity.The paintings resemble each other-both women's smiles
are described as being held "in place" (37, 4())-but they also invert each
other: the speaker'sportrait is illuminated by the "north light" (4()) while
the mother's is lit from the "south." (As Lacan points out, such inversion
is characteristic of the mirror stage [2]). Sexton's speaker addresses both
the mirror image of the mother and the reflection of the self thus con-
firming the identity and inversion that unite them: "my mocking mirror,
my overthrown / love, my first image" (4()).That the mirror is "mocking"
indicates that it offers an idealized image of what the speaker should be,
reinforcing her inadequacy.We are reminded of the plight of the humili-
ated Echo in Ovid's tale and of Narcissus too, who perceives a "mocking
mirror" and experiences the simultaneous enticement and rejection of
his "first image."6
The closing stanza further elaborates the double image of the title.
The speaker finally acknowledges to her daughter that "I needed you"

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 in AnneSexton'sEarlyPoetry
Narcissism

(41), naming the bond between the "I" and "you" suggested in the
opening lines. It is now the daughter,ratherthan the mother, who has
bestowed (gender)identity on the speaker.The mother'sfailureis made
good by the daughter:
I, who was never quite sure
about being a girl, needed another
life, anotherimage to remindme. (41-42)
The "image"is the daughter,producedby the speakerin orderto confirm
her own identity,justas the speaker'smother createdfirstthe speakerand
then an image (portrait)of her in a vain attempt to cling to life. Hence
the speaker'sfinaladmission:"And this was my worst guilt;you could not
cure / nor soothe it. I made you to find me" (42).This is a compelling
conclusion. However,the real interestlies in the confession not that the
speakermade the daughter (biologically)but that she has constructed
the daughterin the poem (textually).Thesefinal lines confirm the poem
as textuallynarcissisticin Hutcheon'sterms.For the ultimatereferentof
"double image"is the poem itself-the strategiesit employs in its con-
structionand its aestheticizationof relationships,experience,subjectivity.
The "worstguilt"pertainsto the speaker'sfabricationand manipulation
of the mother/daughterrelationshipin orderto constructthis very poem
and therebyto createor found (and emphaticallynot to reflect)her sin-
gularidentity as poet:"to find me."
Narcissisticnarrative,as we have seen, is a writing that is concerned
with the role of the reader.Sexton'searlypoem "ForJohn"is notewor-
thy for the way in which it exemplifiesthis concern, addressingin par-
ticularthe discursiverelationshipbetween speakerand reader,penitent
and confessor.There is a criticalconsensusabout the importanceof the
poem as an expressionof Sexton'spoetics. Middlebrook describes"For
John"as a "defense [...] of the whole genre of poetry that would soon
be labeled'confessional'" (100). Diana Hume George declaresthat "the
autobiographicalI becomes a spokespersonfor the poetic and personal
authenticity of the confessionalstance" (101). Caroline King Barnard
Hall arguesthat"ForJohn"should be readas "a credo [. ..] for Sexton's
entire oeuvre" (14). I agree that"ForJohn"marksout Sexton'sposition
as a poet and her conception of and aspirationsfor the confessionalmode.
However,I would arguethatits importancelies not in its defenseof what
confessionrevealsbut in its exemplificationof how it functions.

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The images of the cracked mirror and glass bowl in "For John," in
addition to evoking Narcissus'spool, signify primary subjective narcissism
("the cracked mirror / or my own selfish death" [34]) and may be read as
metaphors for the creative process (I, the poet, look to myself and show
you a reflection of what I see) in all its multifaceted complexity. Moreover,
in this particular poem, the reflective glass instigates the calling in of the
reader and the exchange of responsibility between reader and writer in
the act of perceiving and interpreting confessional meaning.The poem is
predicated on the paradox that in order truthfully to tell us about telling
the truth, the speaker must weave a "complicated lie" (35), which may
itself be a lie-a mise en abymeof the kind that, as we've seen, character-
izes narcissistic narrative.The poem's manipulation of successive shifting
mirror images confirms the potential multiplicity and unreliability of
self-representation. In place of a coherent subject, faithfully mirrored, we
see only fleeting, oblique glimpses of a fragmentary reflection.
"For John" achieves its effects, in part, by anticipating-indeed
parodying-orthodox expectations of its speaker's narcissism. It parades
its insistent first-person voice, its emphatically domestic concerns ("the
commonplaces" [34], the "kitchen" 135]), and its protagonist's prolonged
self-scrutiny in the mirror. The poeml resounds with images for the self,
for self-admiiration, idealization, and subjective pleasure. Lines end with
terms of self-absorption ("mind,""mnirror,"".ec,""nmyself," "private"[34])
that emphasize the narcissistic impulse at play.Yet the text's flamboyant
narcissism is beguiling, masking the absence or dissipation of the self.
Marjorie Perloff argues of postnmodern poetry that "the Romantic or
Modernist cult of personality has given way to what the new poets call
'the dispersal of the speaking subject,'the denial of the unitary,authorita-
tive ego" (Dailce x). However, I would contend that this fracturing or"dis-
persal of the speaking subject" is not unique to postmodern poetry and
is carefully mapped in Sexton's poem.The fragmentation of the "unitary
authoritarian ego" is represented in multiple and proliferating images of
fracture and dissipation reminiscent of those in "The l)ouble Image" and
owing something to the characteristicsof narcissism(a "fragmented"sense
of self, and "identity diffusion" [Berman 25]) as perceived from certain
psychoanalytic perspectives.
The self-assertion of the opening lines of "For John" is counter-
manded by a recognition of others ("you," "your,""something outside,"
"someone," "anyone" [34-35]). The characteristic confessional speaker

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does not emerge until line 5 and is swiftly counterbalanced by the

"you"-the explicit (John) or implicit (the unspecified reader) addressee
whose presence, although always latent in and instrumental to confes-
sion, is here unusually rendered visible within the text. The back and
forth movement anticipates the exchanges between speaker, mother, and
daughter in "The Double Image" (which appears immediately after "For
John" in To Bedlam and Part Way Back, although it was written one year
earlier). Further, the speaker and John/any reader share a mutually venge-
ful and predatory fate akin to that of Narcissus and Echo. Neither is able
to satisfy his or her desire, both have reached the limits of identification,
and neither can penetrate the boundary between self and other. This is
the ever-present risk for confession: that it will not find an auditor and
achieve realization.7
The poem addresses the critical hostility that seems to sustain many
readings of confessional poetry. Its specific origins, arguably,lie in Sexton's
response to a letter she had received from her mentor, the poet and
teacher John Holmes, in which he expressed reservations about what he
perceived to be the narrow narcissism of her work. Latent in the I/you
exchange in the poem is a dialogue between Sexton (the implied author)
and Holmes (the implied addressee). In identifying this letter as a possible
source I do not, however, propose that it explains, or concede that it limits,
the poem's potential meanings. (As Bonnie Costello argues of the overde-
termination of sources in Marianne Moore's work: "This multiplicity of
sources is quite different from the multiplicity of references" [6].) What
I would contend is that Holmes's letter may be taken as a catalyst for the
poem's self-conscious examination of larger confessional processes.
Scrutiny of the letter to Sexton, dated 8 February 1959, reveals the
extent to which "For John" repudiates confessional poetry's detractors.8
Her privileging of the "selfish death" may be read as a defiant challenge
to Holmes's view that she should efface her "hospital and psychiatric
experiences [which seem] to me very selfish." Holmes's letter accuses
her of "forcing others to listen" and complains that, in her work, there is
"nothing given the listeners, nothing that teaches them or helps them."
He adjures her to "do something else, outside yourself." Sexton's speaker
counters that she does teach something, that she offers a "lesson" (34)
that is "worth learning." This is "something special" (35) and defiantly
"something outside of myself."
"For John" insists that there is "sense" and "order" in even the most
private and seemingly abject of experiences:

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Not that it was beautiful,

but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum (34)
By opening the poem with the emphatic "Not," Sexton confronts from
the outset the criticisms she anticipates and proceeds to refute them
with her arguments in the subsequent two lines. The syntax of the first
line refuses the chief motivation ascribed to Narcissus-that is, love of
his own beauty. Sexton suggests that it is "not" the product (the "beauti-
ful" object) that is worthy of attention but the process-the ordering,
the reading, the making of "sense." The lesson that can be learned by
scrutiny of the "narrow diary of my mind" and "the commonplaces of
the asylum" is valuable because it is a lesson that can be shared. "Com-
monplaces" indicates the potential common ground that unites speaker
and reader. Moreover, in its pun on commonplace book, it invokes the
textualization, including that carried out in this very poem, by which the
"lesson" will be delivered.
More generally, the opening lines of the poem foreground the her-
meneutic processes of reading and evaluation by which meaning will
be constructed. The opening line postulates a subject "it" that is never
fully defined, remaining ambiguous throughout the poem in spite of the
speaker's repeated efforts to identify and represent it. The reader's com-
mitment and interpretative powers are first solicited and then held at bay
by this persistent ontological uncertainty. He or she shares the speaker's
uncertainty and (frustrated) desire for resolution. The poem thematizes
this, inscribing within itself an interpretative place for the reader. In
Hutcheon's terms, it is narcissisticin that "it encourages an active personal
response to itself and encourages a space for that response within itself"
(Narcissistic141).
Fundamental to Sexton's representation in "ForJohn" of how mean-
ing is realized and dispersed are the metaphors of mirrors-first the
"cracked mirror" (34) of line 7 and later the inverted glass bowl (line
18). The mirrors figure the text's own processes of contemplation and
reflection. The poem concedes that narcissism is a frustrating and limit-
ing practice, as the confessing subject's initial self-scrutiny in the mirror

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Narcissismin Anne Sexton'sEarlyPoetry

offers no reassurance:"my own selfish death / outstared me." She seeks

in the mirror confirmation of her identity, yet is met with a disfigured
reflection that is inverted; the living subject looks for signs of life and finds
only evidence of death. We recall "The Double Image" and the distor-
tion of the two women's images represented by the dual portraits. For
Lacan, looking in the mirror is a progressive moment-a necessary step
toward successful assumption of the "function as subject" (2)-but in this
poem, there is no such progression. There is no pleasure in this literal and
metaphorical introspection (nor, by extension, in the act of confession),
and considerable psychic risk.
Here and subsequently, with the introduction of the metaphor of the
glass bowl, the speaker gazes at the mirror expecting to see only her own
self given back to her, but what she sees exceeds or "outstare[s]" her. In
addition to her own face she sees reflected the larger context that sur-
rounds or frames her; her context is thus perceived through and beyond
the glass. Equally, when the reader contemplates the mirror (reads the
poem), she thinks that she is looking at someone ("something") else.
What she sees-alongside the putative object of her gaze-is herself in
the process of observing. The shift is reified by the shift in line 11 from
the addressto an implied auditor to a specific addressee ("you" the reader).
Thus in attending to this poem the reader recognizes her own participa-
tion in the discourse.As we saw with the indeterminate "it" of the poem's
opening line, "For John" inscribes a place for the reader within the body
of the text, rendering the public significance of what had once seemed
merely private.
"ForJohn" demonstrates that the narcissisticgesture becomes produc-
tive and meaningful only when it is shared.The "selfish" gaze must-if
it is to mean anything "outside of myself"-be subject to dispersal and
dissemination. The fragmentation of the cracked mirror is instrumental
in bringing this shift to multiplicity about. The mirror in and of the text
offers no clear image, no direct mimesis, but only multiple, scattered-
though suggestive-shards. A similar process is figured in the lucky star
in "An Obsessive Combination" that shines its "inside out." It is only by
refraction that it externalizes its meaning.The language of Sexton's poetry,
then, is multiplicitous, elusive; it functions less as a unifying mirror than
as a prism, splitting and projecting fractured and elliptical images of its
subject.
Consider the image in "For John" of the inverted glass bowl:

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I tapped my own head;

it was glass, an inverted bowl.
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl. (34)
The inverted bowl, while sharing the mimetic properties of a mirror, is
simultaneously transparent.It has the potential to contain and to reveal,
to reflect and refract.The image signifies the potential entrapment and
vulnerability of the subject (Sylvia Plath's The Bell]ar is an obvious pa-
limpsest).' It discloses whatever lies within it and permits the observer to
see all sides of the object, to gain a complete impression."' It also displays
its own external properties, its hermetic identity. Revealing both its inside
and its outside, it stands as a metaphor for the confessional poem and the
larger narcissistic process by which the subject reaches a reconciliation
with the object world. That the speaker "tapped" her "own head" con-
firms the potential contiguity of self and other and the fluidity of the
boundaries between the private and the public. For "tapped" signifies
both the process of siphoning insights from inside the head and the act
of beating out a pattern (a poem?) on the outside for the edification of
others.The speaker may tap-make a sound-either to initiate a dialogue
or cause an echo.'' The image insinuates the indivisibility of subject and
discourse, product and process.
The inverted bowl, like the earlier cracked mnirror,gives back frag-
mented images (the awkward bowl's "cracked stars shining" [34] sustain
the original disfigurement in and of the cracked mirror). As Jonathan
Miller points out: "in contrast to a plain or flat surface, which faithfully
reproduces the proportions of whatever it reflects, a curved surface sys-
tematically disfigures it" (43). As an image of the poem itself, the bowl
suggests the confessional text's own distortions and unreliability. Sexton's
mirrors are always imperfect, crazed, curved, oblique, or, as in "The
Double Image," set directly opposite another mirror so that all one sees
is an endless, imprisoning cascade of reflections that allows no space for
the growth and development of the subject. Self-reflection is not what it
might seem, and gives back an image that is attenuated, fractured, sepa-
rated, and dispersed.
Mimesis is to be treated warily; there is no such thing as direct, un-
problematic reflection.The act of mirroring, we find, is fraught with error
and uncertainty. It is both multiplicitous and duplicitous.We should note

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that Abrams's generally positive account of poetic mimesis is only able

to refer to its subject in a sequence of synonyms that connote distortion
and imprecision: "counterfeiting," "feigning" (11). Thus the representa-
tion of subjectivity or experience that confessional poetry (specifically
"For John") offers is to be understood as a copy of or approximation
to the original, but not as identical with it. What confessional writing
does is contemplate and expose the complexity of identity, the absence
or elusiveness (even in this apparently self-expressive mode) of a unified,
homogenous subject.12
Sexton's poem presents a fundamentally narcissistic moment-a mo-
ment of crisis in the subject's sense of self and her relation to the external
world. This is laid bare for contemplation by both speaker and reader. It
is the potential communality of experience here, the fact that narcissism
forms "a place in the regular course of human sexual development" (Freud
65), that forms the heart of Sexton's argument and aesthetic defense.We
all go through this process, and the poem reminds us of this, inviting us
to revisit it:
This is something I would never find
in a lovelier place, my dear,
although your fear is anyone's fear,
like an invisible veil between us all ...
and sometimes in private,
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face. (35)
The implicit I/you dialogue that has sustained the whole poem is here
rendered more generally inclusive. "Anyone" invokes Everyman and
registers the broadening of the speaker's attention from a specific reader
(John) to a wider group; "us all" encapsulates both speaker and multiple
readers. In the simultaneously transparent and reflective bowl, we look
for self and find other, we look for other and find self. What we see is
both "my kitchen" and "your kitchen," "my face" and "your face." Nar-
cissism is revealed to be a public and discursive rather than private and
hermetic gesture.The personal preoccupation ("my") gives way to public
responsibility ("your"). The quiet, balanced, closing lines of the poem,
with their symmetry and soft diminuendo, mimic the gentle sound of an
echo tailing off:

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and sometimes in private,

my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face,your face.
John Holmes's concluding message to Sexton in the letter that ar-
guably inspired the poem specificallyalludes to Ovid's tale. Holmes's
anxiety about Sexton's writing is galvanizedby his fear that Sexton's
fate may repeat that of Narcissus:"You must liberateyour gift, and let
it create new life, not gaze alwayshypnotized on death and the wreck
of nerves"(a comment that arguablyprovidesa source for Sexton'sline
"my own selfish death / outstaredme"). "ForJohn"ultimatelyanswers
confessionalism'scritics by expresslyembracingthe very processagainst
which they warn.It not only explains,it shows.Sexton demonstratesthat
narcissismdoes not necessarilymean introspectivestasis.As in Ovid'stale,
where Narcissus'slegacy is "a flowerwith a circleof white petalsrounda
yellow centre"(87), Sexton'sspeaker'sself-absorptionis productive.It is
transformedinto "somethingoutside of myself,"something that at least
"ought"to be "special/ for someone."
It is illuminatingto consider"ForJohn" in relationto a prominent
postconfessionalpoemothat takesup the question of-self-mnirroring:John
Ashbery's"Self-Portraitin a Convex Mirror."Ashbery'spoemicontem-
plates Parmigianino'spainting of that name and, in particular,the reso-
nance of the convex nirror that is both the source (the artistpaintsfrom
his reflection in it) and product of the painting (the finished portraitis
paintedon a convex wooden form thatreplicatesthatof the imirror).Ash-
bery,too, acknowledgesthatsuch a self-portraitis distortedand distorting,
indeed "thatyou could be fooled for a moment / Beforeyou realizethe
reflection/ Isn'tyours"(194). In Ashbery'spoem, as in Sexton's,the con-
vex mirrorprivilegessurfaceover depth. ForAshbery"everythingis sur-
face.The surfaceis what'sthere"(190). In both poemnsthe public display
of the curved mirroremphasizesthe outward-looking,social,discursive
natureof what had previouslybeen understoodas a purelyintrospective
narcissism.Theimperativein each is not merelyto gaze upon the self ("It
is a smallthing / to rage in your own bowl") but to sharethat which is
found with the reader.Sexton wields her glassbowl so that its "cracked
stars"shine forth,disseminatingmeaning.Ashbery'sconvex mirrorsimi-
larlyreachesoutward.It is refractedin the "sawtoothedfragments"(191)
of a puddle and finally reverberatesmore widely throughout"the city"
in "the gibbous / Mirroredeye of an insect"(204) which, like Sexton's
crazed mirror, functions as a prism.

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Narcissismin Anne Sexton'sEarlyPoetry

As we saw in the opening lines of her poem, Sexton confronts the

reader'sreluctance to participate in the hermeneutic process that it reveals.
Her defiant wielding of the bowl forces the reader to participate in the
narcissistic process, prevents him or her from looking away, inscribes a
place for the reader within the text as one part of the mirrored scene:
And if you turn away
because there is no lesson here
I will hold my awkward bowl,
with all its cracked stars shining
like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun. (34-35)
Equally,Ashbery's poem reminds us that the self-portrait "is a metaphor /
Made to include us, we are a part of it" (196-97). Both poems, then, may
be read as a contemplation of the process by which art (Parmigianino's
painting, Sexton's poem, Ashbery's self-portrait with a "pencil" [191])
enters into a productive and mutually sustaining relationship with its
audience.
The surface of Parmigianino's self-portrait in Ashbery's poem glows
with potential significations:it is a "silver blur" (192), its "cover burnishes,"
it has a "disguising radiance" (204). Sexton's bowl, too, radiates meaning.
However, this is born not of authenticity but of artifice. Recognizing
that alone it may not compel or retain the reader-indeed, that its very
transparency or nakedness may repel him or her-the speaker takes steps
to render her "lesson" more acceptable, dressing or disguising the bowl
in luminous "orange" so that it shines like a "strange sun."As the poem's
argument develops, what we see is emphatically not a pure, unmediated
reflection of lived experience as might perhaps be expected of confes-
sional poetry. Rather, it is a fabrication, an object masked or disguised,
dressed with a "new skin."In a genre apparently predicated on revelation,
this metaconfession that the essence of confession lies in dressing up,
rather than undressing, in disguise rather than nakedness, in deceit rather
than honesty, is supremely telling.
Abrams, as we have seen, distinguishes between mimetic and expres-
sive forms of art,between the mirror and the lamp. Perloff too posits a dif-
ference between postmodern and lyric forms of poetry based on a distinc-

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tion between "artifice" and "authenticity."I would contend that Sexton's

simultaneously reflective and luminous bowl refuses to choose between
these aesthetics.The "glass bowl shining" both reflects and reveals. How-
ever, both functions are imperfect. The reflective surface is "awkward,"
"cracked,"and "complicated," offering no clear mimesis.The sun, instead
of merely figuring illumination and insight, is veiled and disguised;dressed
in a "new skin," it cannot penetrate with directness or clarity but must
carefully screen its message. In both cases, something ostensibly transpar-
ent or luminous is rendered translucent such that the confessional subject
ostensibly being reflected or expressed is obscured by a crazed or veiled
surface. However, with its self-consciously selected metaphors suggestive
of the refraction and diffusion of light-of the prismatic splitting of its
source into scattered elements-"For John" ensures that its meaning is
shared. Something apparently singular, personal, and solipsistic is made
multiple, social, discursive.
For self-reflexivity to be identified as characteristic of Ashbery's
writing (and of the work of a number of other postmodern writers) it
has been necessary to deny its presence in Sexton's work-to reduce
confessionalism to this emergent poetry's other. (Such a will to classify is
foreshadowed, perhaps, in Ashbery's suggestion in "Self-Portrait" that "If
they are to become classics / They must decide which side they are on"
[196]). Thus Harold Bloom declares that Ashbery "writes out of so pro-
found a subjectivity as to make 'confessional' verse seem as self-defeating
as that mode truly has been, from Coleridge (its inventor) down to Lowell
and his disciples" (117-18). And Laurence Lieberman celebratesAshbery's
presentation of self as "swept clear of melodrama, the news-hawking
debris of personality, all the detritus comprising the stock-in-trade of
the confessional poets' school" (23). I would suggest, however, that the
vehemence of these rejections of the confessional other reveals-while it
attempts to deny-a profound commonality of poetic interests.
Marjorie Perloff sees as characteristic of modern (that is, pre-post-
modernist) poetry the eventual realization of "some sort of epiphany,
a moment of insight or vision with which the poem closes" (Dance
156-57).Yet, as we have seen in "For John," "An Obsessive Combina-
tion," and the other poems mentioned here, this is not a characteristic
of Sexton's work. Rather, her poetry features an arguably postmodernist
tendency toward equivocation and indeterminacy, toward provisionality,
uncertainty, and evasion. Sexton's reluctance to conclude her writing on

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Narcissismin Anne Sexton'sEarlyPoetry

a resounding, authoritative, and thus normative and reassuring note is a

sign of refusal to concede to totalization and of a wish to keep multiple
interpretive possibilities open. Hence the multifaceted bowl of "For
John" and the many-pointed star of"An Obsessive Combination": in-
sight is always complex and diffuse. Sexton's poetry thus seeks the middle
ground, the medial space between the outside and the inside, the public
and the private, the mirror and the lamp (equally,between lies and truth,
obfuscation and confession, artifice and authenticity). While exploiting
the materiality of the mirror, Sexton's writing's primary interest is in the
compelling intangibility of the reflection.
The received history ofAmerican poetry is the history of a movement
from an impersonal, modernist aesthetic to a personal, lyrical, confessional
narcissism and on to a cool, self-reflexive, linguistically sophisticated
postmodernism. Sexton's poetry, I have suggested, transgresses received
generic boundaries and problematizes this trajectory. By redefining our
understanding of the apparentnarcissismof her early work we can see that
the profound self-reflexivity, the language play, and the undermining of
processes of representation and revelation that are thought to characterize
avant-garde and postmodernist poetic forms alone are, in fact, central to
Sexton's poetics.

Notes
1. Anne Sexton:The CompletePoemsis the source of all the poems I quote ex-
cept "An ObsessiveCombination,"which is from SelectedPoemsofAnneSexton.
2. Other importantpost-Freudianreadingsof narcissisminclude those of Otto
Kernbergand Heinz Kohut,psychiatristswhose work, although offering en-
tirely divergentperspectiveson the condition, has dominatedthe understand-
ing of narcissismin the United Statessince the 1970s. See Berman 20 ff.
3. Interestingly,asJuliet Mitchell points out, Freuddoes not mention the role
of Echo in his interpretationof the Narcissusmyth (30).
4. Middlebrookspeculatesthat"An ObsessiveCombination"was written
duringAugust 1958 (124). However,as it is apparentthat Sexton studied
Hopkins'spoetry during her time as a student in Robert Lowell'swriting class
(September1958 to 1959), it is arguablethat her poem originatesat least one
month later.On Lowell and Hopkins,see Hamilton (78) and Lowell (167-70).

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Jo Gill

5. See Middlebrook 98-99 on Sexton's use of acrostics.

6. The mother's portrait is perceived as "a cave of a mirror" (38). Unrecog-
nized by previous commentators on this poem, Sexton's linking of the mirror
and the cave is profoundly significant, paralleling Echo's retreat to the caves in
Ovid's story.
7. Heinz Kohut, a leading figure in the psychology of narcissism, notes the
importance of empathy on the part of the observer/analyst to the resolution of
primitive narcissism (Berman 31-32).
8. Manuscripts in the Anne Sexton collection at the Harry Ransom Humani-
ties Research Center indicate that the poem was drafted on 12 February 1959.
9. Sexton's poem was probably critiqued in one of Robert Lowell's Boston
University workshops in the spring of 1959. Plath audited the class alongside
Sexton, George Starbuck, and others. She first joined the group on 24 Febru-
ary 1959 and in her journal entry for the next day uses the image of a bell jar
(470). One month later (29 March 1959) the seeds of the plot of the novel are
recorded in her journal. The bell jar motif had been used once before by Plath
(in July 1952) to describe the ennui of summer vacations. Sexton's poem, with
its image of the inverted glass bowl, may have prompted Plath to revisit the
metaphor. Arguably, Sexton's use of the image in her sophisticated exploration
of writing, gender, and subjectivity offered Plath exactly the figure she needed
to represent Esther Greenwood's mixed sense of vulnerability and visibility.

10. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau explains in his Confessions:"I should like in some

way to make my soul transparent to the reader's eye, and for that purpose I am
trying to present it from all points of view, to show it in all lights" (169).
11. The influence of Henry James's The Golden Bowl is apparent here. Sexton
annotated her copy of the book throughout, and there are many resemblances
between the properties of his bowl and hers. In addition, the image of tapping
is used to similar effect in both texts. In The Golden Bowl, Maggie has (meta-
phorically)
sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates. She had
knocked, in short-though she could scarcely have said whether for
admissionor for what [...] and had waited to see what would happen.
Something had happened: it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little,
had come back to her from within. (328)
12. Christina Britzolakis makes a related point in connection with Plath's use
of mirror metaphors in her journals: "ironically, these are almost invariably
linked with moments of specular mis- or non-recognition in which the sub-

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Narcissismin Anne Sexton'sEarlyPoetry

ject is encounteredas abject,resistantotherness"(16) and are seen as "the sign

of a self-reflexivitywhich is alternatelyparalyzingand enabling"(17).

Unpublishedmanuscriptsand lettersare used with the permissionof the

HarryRansom HumanitiesResearch Center,UniversityofTexas,Austin,and
with the permissionof Doris Holmes Eyges (for the letters of John Holmes)
and LindaGraySexton (formaterialfrom the Anne Sexton archive).John
Gery has offeredincisiveand stimulatingcomments on successivedraftsof this
essay,and his contributionis acknowledgedwith gratitude.

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